welcome! jeremy freese is a professor in sociology at northwestern university. he finds blogging to be a good diversion from insomnia and a far better use of time than television.

Saturday, June 30, 2007

the boy detective at work

I love the folks at Stata, but right there in the Stata manual:

As always, Stata is 100% compatible with the previous releases...

If only this was true. Instead, when Stata goes to a new version, my collaborator and I have to go through and figure out what parts of our programs have been broken by changes. I've spent the last two hours trying to figure out a bug that has been caused by a change to their -asmprobit- command (alternative-specific multinomial probit, which to my knowledge has never actually been used by a sociologist, and I actually think that's just as well). Whatever the problem is here, it is so ridiculously subtle it is putting my boy detective skills to the test.

I've got a lead, but I don't think I'm going to get this solved before I have to leave to meet people for this Boston Harbor Islands adventure today. Ugh. I'm already pushing it time-wise (if you are wondering why I'm writing a blog post then, it's that I'm waiting on Stata to execute something).

Apropos of nothing, last night I heard Kiss's song "Beth." I've always wondered: do you think the guy is really not going home to his beloved because his band needs to practice? Or, do you think that's just an excuse he's using because he's really out tomcatting around? He is a guy in a metal band, after all.

4 comments:

I think by 100% compatible they mean "hey if you use the version command it'll run your code as if you were still using Stata N-1." Of course if Stata had really "always" been 100% compatible I would not have sat down on my laptop a few years ago with some data I'd generated on my school desktop (which had just been upgraded to Stata 8) and panicked when I realized that I couldn't open it with Stata 7. I guess later this summer I'll get to find out if Stata 10 wreaks havoc on any of my current work.